You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 47: Nico & Muzz - The Revolution Is Under Way

Starting point is 00:00:00 I received an email basically saying, we've taken down your content. You have dangerous and harmful content. And I knew that that day would eventually come. The problem is that they put layer upon layer upon layer of tech before you're able to talk to a human. It's the world we're stepping into. Yeah. I'm personally a big fan of the ETFs. It's a great gateway drug for my mom, for other people who write down 12 words and then crap themselves.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Oh my God, what am I going to do with this thing? Yet somehow you can keep a social security card your whole life. You can manage to hold that card your whole life. But 12 words on a piece of paper. Oh, my God, I'm too scared. Twitter is like doom porn. Like you just scroll and it's like the world is on fire. Category five hurricane.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Election stolen. You know, you're like, oh, my God, like 50 rockets hit. You just scroll and that's all you see. On Noster, it's like the world is great. I love steak. Here's a picture of my baby. it's night and day do not underestimate the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit the world is about to get better these powers that control censorship whether it's financial

Starting point is 00:01:11 and social they're all going away okay hello and welcome to another wonderful funky episode of you're the voice thank you for being with me i'm still in bitcoin amsterdam i have two very special guests here today Muz and Nico. Yo, this is awesome. This whole live setup, this is very sophisticated. Thank you very much. I like it.

Starting point is 00:01:49 I'm very excited to be. When I grow up, I want to be Nico, so I'm learning. When I grow up, I want to be Efrat. This is really cool. This is really cool. Hey, Muz. And I'm even super more excited because. Is Muz here?

Starting point is 00:02:01 Muz is here. Next to me. You know, I don't usually get these VIP invites to hang out with people of this caliber. I'm just here. I'm going to try and hold my own, and I'm going to be very polite and nice. Pretend to be a pleb. After three or four beers on day two of the conference right at the end, I'm very excited. Okay, so let's start with what got you excited in the past two days. Was there anything that got you excited?

Starting point is 00:02:27 And you can say the truth. It's fine if there wasn't. This year has been so wild in terms of conferences uh that i'm very happy because i've never been to this conference before and it's very nice to see people like you and people like muz um and the venue is amazing yes right um so and then i also like i love this i do this you know you do the panels and you do the you know the cameras and this stuff i i like it it's what i like to do right so uh yeah it's uh it's one of those things that's in the memory books good you're living your i think you're living your your passion this is what you like doing yeah like being in front of a stage camera audience like i see you do that

Starting point is 00:03:18 every day sometimes i ask myself how do you have the power to do it every day almost every day i don't know i have no idea i and i used to do it six days a week instead of five uh i think i was young stupid and driven now you're a father we're gonna talk about that in a sec muz what did you like in the past two days you're still young and driven okay let's start with that um what did i like well here's a nice change of pace it actually says sold out for the conference website for tickets yeah right before it started they sold the maximum number there that they could and that hasn't happened in a really long time that has not happened where you know you you've you've seen it and if you were here last year it was certainly not sold out so that's pretty darn

Starting point is 00:04:10 exciting that's a that's a pretty good sign of what's coming ahead is the fact that the conferences are back to um sold out and high levels yeah and as far as things that um i'm excited about honestly um i've pretty much avoided a lot of these new bitcoin things all of these kind of layer two things other things i've never looked at any of them i don't know anything about them i'm gonna just for just my own sake so i can speak intelligently on them yeah i'm gonna go deep down the rabbit hole of all of these things i am i have no idea honestly i would love to be able to actually learn why they're terrible i know why stacks is terrible i know why rootstock is terrible but all of these new things i'm going to learn if there's any merit there or anything that's

Starting point is 00:05:00 actually happening or if those are terrible too because i can't just avoid it you know i want to say to everyone that don't know that mike is the ceo of thunder funder and founder of lightning ventures and he happens to be an investor in an insane number of startups and so it's kind of surprising to me to hear that there is some kind of technology that you don't know is there something that is new for you that you've picked up here well we're all maxis and we're all real people and we don't deal with any of that stuff um but it would be nice to know about it I don't know. The minute that I look at things and it's token, this, DeFi, whatever, layer two, interoperability,

Starting point is 00:05:43 they've got like, they all have the same slide. And it's like 35 different things. There's arrows pointing at all of them and they all go down to a thing and it's all a time lock and there's a, I have no idea what's going on. Okay. But I'm going to actually learn about it. Isn't it more in the realm of cryptocurrencies, tokenization, let's tokenize your air, your water your farts like everything you do we can put on the blockchain and trade it i mean if that's

Starting point is 00:06:10 what it is then i'm not buying i i like it i personally love tokenized farts okay no but i i i you hear all these things that are being built on top of bitcoin to like to add to muz's point like um i i don't know like there was like this runes i heard about runes the ordinal stuff um what there's a bunch of other stuff too i i don't i still don't know what any of it any of it is um nico farts are getting added to kraken next month just as yeah yeah so if you want to get ahead of that i can't is there a token for it like a n-i-c-f n-i-c-o-f you gotta you gotta check in with my okay nico is the founder and host of simply bitcoin i didn't say at the beginning which is a media company creating bitcoin related content faster than

Starting point is 00:07:09 the speed of light i added that nico's purpose is to help people regain their financial sovereignty using bitcoin i love how every morning when i open my twitter you say good morning bitcoin or slavery i love it thank you for saying that for reminding everyone well that's very kind of you um yeah you you gotta you gotta have a reason to get up in the morning right and uh you're the voice is brought to you by trezor the original bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount

Starting point is 00:07:59 on treasure product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code flat bitcoin when i found bitcoin in 2016 i was like at a really low point in my life and uh like i'll be honest with you like i was just like i think this is this thing is cool and it's gonna make me rich so i just went all in and uh you know you come for the money you stay for the revolution and then over time you know you start to learn of course what is money uh you know it gave me a purpose gave me a career and gave me a huge network of awesome people like you guys um i'm super super grateful for that so can you share a bit about your background and where you were born yeah what got you to do what you do today um yeah so my background uh i was i was born in

Starting point is 00:08:52 originally i was born in germany to venezuelan parents um i was raised in miami and uh i have no i had no background in media whatsoever but i always loved youtube um so like i've been to i've had eight years of bitcoin of youtube university i know the platform like the back of my hand and um just starting to make media i remember i was in the bitcoin conference 2021 main stage and a friend of mine who's now head of news at bitcoin magazine he like he invited me on there and i was i wasn't known and simply bitcoin at the time had like 400 subscribers or something. And I pitched the idea on stage to the crowd. And what I identified was that a lot of the altcoin channels were using a lot of the tools and tactics that are very successful on

Starting point is 00:09:50 YouTube in order to grow these massive audiences. And I never saw any Bitcoin only channels doing that. So I just told the audience, I'm like, we're going to use the clickbait and the thumbnails and all that stuff but to get people to click on bitcoin only content it was just a theory back then um fast forward four years later you know seems like it's kind of panned out um how many followers today for simply in all the different platforms oh across all the platforms i don't know that's uh more or less more than probably like more than 150k more than 160 if you include my personal handle on there probably like 200 000 or so um we definitely pack a like we we definitely pack a punch like we we get a lot more views than what our following is of course just because we

Starting point is 00:10:44 optimize a lot of our content to make it youtube specific and a lot of other people don't do that and um that's where the youtube university kind of comes into like i've i've been on that platform for so long, and I know it very well, that if you master the distribution platform of which you're going to put your content, it takes you a really long way. And actually, what I've seen is people that work in traditional media, they have to learn a lot of the things that they were actually taught, because it actually works to your disadvantage, depending on the distribution platform of which you're posting onto. So if you're posting on Twitter, if you're posting on YouTube, and you've been taught to post media a certain way, you kind of have to unlearn all of

Starting point is 00:11:35 that. And you have to come to the realization that I'm posting on Twitter. Therefore, I now have to become a Twitter expert for me to flourish on this platform. And the same thing applies to YouTube. So all of that is just like very interesting stuff. But I think it created an opportunity for bitcoin only content creators so you see these massive podcasters like natalie and peter like yourself also breed love um and then you have you know the bitcoin only content like simply and stuff like that so yeah it was really exciting and this all started in 2020 in 2020 there was no bitcoin only content it was like in its very very infancy and then now it's just bloomed like now it's everywhere so it's really cool to see it's amazing we're going to come back to you

Starting point is 00:12:22 with the recent censorship by youtube that you love so much and know like the back of your hand let's move to maz with thunder thunder can you tell us a bit about your new venture and what led you to set up thunder thunder and where you started from maybe thunder thunder.com thunderfunder.com sign up for free at thunderfunder.com 1-800-THUNDER-FUNDER I actually want to buy it. Do you want to buy it?

Starting point is 00:12:53 I want to buy 1-800-THUNDER. So I'm all about democratizing access to Bitcoin startups. Yep. And otherwise inaccessible ways to invest in these companies. Yep. Because if this is what happens in the 90s with what happened with the internet

Starting point is 00:13:09 the companies building on or around or with bitcoin are going to be super valuable and they're going to outpace uh the price appreciation of bitcoin or they're also going to go to zero and you have to know about the risk so instead of being uh an investor who is forced to invest in a fund with a 250 000 minimum or a big minimum and letting someone else decide i like to be able to offer those opportunities to individuals and say it's your money you decide get started angel investing with small amounts read updates, see what you can learn in the process, and then the numbers can always go up later.

Starting point is 00:13:46 What's a small amount? With Lightning Ventures, it's $1,000, but you also have to be an accredited investor. With Thunder Funder, pretty much anyone can invest globally, and we're going to have the amounts less than $1,000. Okay. And you can also fund in Bitcoin. So in theory, if we had an opportunity to invest in Strike,

Starting point is 00:14:07 You could literally open your Strike wallet, pay an invoice for $500. You could fund that venture investment into Strike's deal all right there, you know, and still have the upside. So crowdfunding gets mixed up with all these other platforms. Indiegogo, GoFundMe. Yes. Aunt Mary Needs a New Kidney. Whatever it is, right? That's all great and all, but that's not equity, okay?

Starting point is 00:14:33 Equity crowdfunding is a fairly novel new part of this space. I want to invest, so what do I do? I just go to ThunderFunder.com? You can go to ThunderFunder.com and you can invest in whatever deals are coming there. Or you could be a media company. Like if simply Bitcoin wanted to do a revenue sharing agreement and sort of raise some money. Like maybe half a million dollars would allow him to go to some 24-7 awesome network and take it to the next level. sure he could do that raise on thunder funder we could close the deal in bitcoin and then he would

Starting point is 00:15:08 have investors in a full army of people that would be supporting him right in a community yeah right they would also not just supporting him like hey i want you to make that documentary bro here's some money but they would be entitled to some profits in return i like it do you like it i love I love Muzz. He's going to sponsor. He's going to sponsor Simply. So I love Muzz. I don't have the technical background that Muzz has in investing and all that, but I go by my intuition a lot. And one of the things that I love about Muzz is I've seen him work on this for the last two years And I've seen him go through the struggle of like creating the idea and then going through the different iterations and the trials and tribulations to get to where he's at right now. And I've interacted with him these last couple of years.

Starting point is 00:16:06 And I have memories from the first time he mentioned this to me. Yeah. And look at where we are now, two years later, and he's doing professional presentations about this idea that has been marinating in his head. So when I see that, I feel that there's true passion and belief behind his ideas and he's been able to manifest that and create that into reality. So I might not know any of the technical aspects, but the human side of it, I saw it and I saw the suffering that was put in in order for him to get to that point. And I think anything in life that is worth building requires that amount of effort and passion. You know, there's something cool here. So when I was getting started, the first fund was no fees, literally running it for free for friends and family for me to get my start to do what I'm doing and build out the network. OK, so I went to Nico. We were already maybe halfway through it.

Starting point is 00:17:08 And I was like, hey, you want to throw in if you want to invest in this right now, we're not talking about a lot of money here, but it's a friends and family deal. And he did and he invested and we were just outside right now and he met one of the co-founders of a company. And coincidentally, you know, he's inadvertently he's invested in that company right through the fund because they're a portfolio company. So it just it gives you a lot of other exposure to a lot of other things where you didn't necessarily would have really thought about it. Right. But he's in that situation. I'm like, hey, you know, you're you're aligned with their success. You know, you're both aligned. So this is really the manifestation of you build the future that you want to see. You guys are so deep into the Bitcoin ecosystem and you love it and you want to see it succeed, not just the ecosystem, but Bitcoin network in general. And you're actually building stuff for people in this community that you are making this happen.

Starting point is 00:18:08 This is a beauty. But that work is relative to the individual, because I remember when I met Nico and he would just say to me constantly, I'm grinding, bro. I'm grinding, bro. Jesus has a way of saying, like, I'm grinding, you know? And it's true. It's a grind. It's a daily show, whether you're in the mood or you're not in the mood. That's a big commitment.

Starting point is 00:18:29 And you're doing it. But look at you. Look at where you've come, right? You're grinding through it. Yeah. And you put certain things first, and you've both gotten to a level. So you can say, oh, well, all these other people, they're doing all the work, but you guys are doing the work, you know, to get where you're at.

Starting point is 00:18:46 For sure. Thank you. nico i want to go back to youtube what did they do to you yeah so and were you surprised when it happened i wasn't surprised i was mentally preparing myself like on an emotional level for a couple of years because so for people who don't know nico's channel was banned from youtube that was three weeks ago four weeks ago yeah it was like about a month ago um i received an email basically saying we've taken down your content for uh violating it's it's dangerous and harmful you have dangerous and harmful content and um i knew that that day would eventually come

Starting point is 00:19:30 but there's a there's a very small window that if your channel is not at a certain size and if you haven't built a big enough reputation you can't make enough noise where a human being will actually look at your channel to see if it actually violated the terms of service what i've seen happen to multiple smaller channels they don't have the following they don't get a forbes article written about them they don't get a zero hedge article written about them they don't get the entire bitcoin community backing up yeah saying like simply bitcoin got banned right and youtube just doesn't want to just doesn't get a human to look at the content so they say you know what the algo said this is harmful and dangerous this is harmful and dangerous i'm sorry right so

Starting point is 00:20:22 we were lucky enough to have the bitcoin community behind us and get a little bit of legacy media coverage where we made enough noise where an actual human being reviewed the content that was flagged harmful and dangerous and they saw oh wait a second no this is they're just you know they're just making bitcoin content and they reinstated the channel so i think it's a very scary time not do you buy that it was a mistake i think it was an algorithmic trigger um do i believe is do i believe it was a mistake i think it was i think youtube relies a lot on algorithms to delete content and to censor certain content. That's for sure.

Starting point is 00:21:06 And I think that if you say a certain amount of words in a certain amount of time, it flags the system and it automatically pulls down the live stream. And the reason that I knew that it was going to come is because it's happened to Bitcoin Magazine, it's happened to Swan's channel, it's happened to BTC Sessions' channel.

Starting point is 00:21:23 So I knew in my head, I'm like, one day you're going to get an email and they're just going to say, sorry, your channel's gone. So it could be that you said too many times, like, let's separate money and state, let's separate money and state, let's separate money and state, Elizabeth Warren this, or Jerome Powell that. A hundred percent. And I had a game plan from, and it took me like a year and a half, two years

Starting point is 00:21:46 to build this out. I said, I need to have such a network that the day that this happens, I'm going to reach out to every single one of these big names. And I'm going to say, my channel got banned. can you retweet this yeah and that's exactly what i did and every single person just the the community rallied behind it but i was very fortunate because i've heard horror stories that people just don't get their channels back they just don't get it it's yeah it's extremely proof of stake and the reality and then what a lot of the feedback that i'll get is like nico then why are you posting on youtube what a lot of people don't realize is that youtube is this the world's second largest search engine so if you're a dude trying to make a video only play

Starting point is 00:22:31 and you don't have a large enough platform you don't really have another choice like if you want to make it and have any chance it has to be where you grow your base on youtube once it's big enough you could take them anywhere and they'll follow you but initially you don't really have a choice and especially if you want to be competitive right um so yeah it's a scary place that this platform has so much power but that's why i'm so bullish on protocols like noster and alternative video platforms like x and rumble that are at least providing alternatives for people that do get the platforms and what i was really surprised about efrat is that the two days that we were not able to live stream on youtube everyone followed us to rumble of course

Starting point is 00:23:19 and i did not i couldn't believe it i was like holy cow like the we're getting better live stream numbers on rumble right now than we were getting on youtube this is crazy and since then you continue doing rumble yeah so we have gone now i've gone above and beyond to not only post on rumble and x but we are posting on nostre every single live stream goes on nostre we're getting maybe like 20 people watching lives it's not much it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it's not about the number it's about being multi-present and it's about supporting the protocol because me and from my understanding it's really me and btc sessions that are really regularly posting live streams on there and if we're the ones that are just gonna push the

Starting point is 00:24:07 Nostr content forward, I will happily do that because I didn't appreciate Nostr until I got deplatformed. The moment I got deplatformed, I said Nostr is the future. Yeah, you met it through the pain. Yeah, I get it. Maz, do you want to add anything on censorship online? Look, it's terrifying. Not for someone like me. I'm not a content creator, but you put so much work into those youtube numbers and learning the algorithm and doing the work over the years you know and you know your work managing other large uh companies youtube channels and putting some real gas on their fire you know you put so much work into it over the years and then you wake up one day and poof you know and you're just kind of setting yourself up whether you own your audience

Starting point is 00:24:56 or don't own your audience and how do you reach them and they'll some of follow you but a lot of people are lazy right they like the youtube thing and it's on their roku and how are they going to find this other thing and it that actually just terrifies me um i think it's getting better actually with a lot of it now especially with x but like it terrifies me that you can work so hard to build that business to build that audience to build your livelihood and future and then just poof poof you have to figure it out it's it's really scary i learned it first in 2005 or 6 when I had an e-commerce store on eBay. It was just the beginning of e-commerce.

Starting point is 00:25:35 But I put my heart and soul into that store and I was selling back in the days it was fashion and accessories. And one day eBay closed my store because of something. Even back then they had this automatic enforcement. And once they closed it, I realized that I am in the hands of this big brother that can close my livelihood down at any moment and from that early on I understood that I have to be present in as many platforms as possible because I'm a person who just speaks all the time

Starting point is 00:26:09 and creates content even before I did that for a living you know so I try to spread myself as much as I can between different platforms it does mean that you have to manage a lot of channels and it is more work but then you have redundancies and then you have also a lot of followers from different demographies and different groups and it does prove itself with time it's a long-term investment but it's it's smart yeah it's it's totally worth it not to put all your eggs in one basket exactly the a lot of these platforms like what people don't understand is that they're super proof of state yeah they're super proof of state like the the email that i got from a human being at youtube apologizing was like i was like wow these are the nicest people

Starting point is 00:27:01 on earth they're like we are so sorry and it's like emily and i responded emily thank you so much for your email and then she responded back so there's an there's there's actual people the problem is that they put layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of buffering yeah of like tech before you're able to talk to a human but the moment you're able to talk to a human like yeah things just happen that's the world we're we're stepping into yeah that's in every tech platform that's what we're gonna see yeah and that's pretty crappy it's i mean that's why i love nostril yeah like it there is no like you know there is no uh support team or there is no whatever it's just like it's just there it's a jungle and it's there forever and you can't you

Starting point is 00:27:44 can't delete anything i know it's a jungle for a content creator not being able to edit or delete anything is pretty wild yeah took me time to get used to that idea sometimes i post stuff and i have a mistake i post it again i go ignore the previous one this is the the right one i like it i like it and it's really interesting too the psychology behind and i'm sure muz you know more about this the psychology of when you post on noster versus psychology of when you post on Twitter when I post on Twitter it's like a business transaction I'm thinking okay if I post this and this doesn't get a hundred likes I'm gonna delete this tweet or it's just not worth it for me so I put on a lot of effort into thinking what I'm gonna post yeah on Noster I'll have a random

Starting point is 00:28:34 thought pop into my head and I'll go yeah send and I don't care like I don't care about the interaction or the growth or the thing and i think it boils down to the fact that on twitter you're being manipulated about your your dopamine receptors are being hijacked by the algorithm and on noster it's just organic yeah so it's a much more human like it's a it's an actual human interaction versus like you're being hijacked and you're being forced to because like twitter is like it's like doom porn like you just scroll and it's like the world is on fire category five hurricane election stolen you know you're just middle east war you know what i'm saying yeah rockets over your head 11 clips you're like you're like oh my god like 50 rockets hit like it's like

Starting point is 00:29:27 you see like it's like you just scroll and that's all you see on nostril it's like the world is great i love steak here's a picture of my baby it's night and day yeah it's night and day yeah i i agree okay listen guys we're 15 years into bitcoin life cycle there's this cypherpunk ethos that came along with the invention of bitcoin and there recently is an institutional adoption and a lot of suits, you know, talking about this asset and calling people to invest in their financial tools that are backed by this asset, which is totally different than what Bitcoin started as.

Starting point is 00:30:11 So, you know, as two people that have been in the industry for a long time and have been going with the journey of Bitcoin, seeing it developing, waiting and anticipating and hyper-Bitcoinization and wanting more people to adopt this. How do you see where we are today? And how do you see where Bitcoin is going to go? And do you like that trajectory? I'm personally a big fan of the ETFs.

Starting point is 00:30:40 And it's unpopular. You say freely whatever you think, dude. It's a great gateway drug. It's a great gateway drug for my mom, for other people who write down 12 words and then crap themselves, oh, my God, what am I going to do with this thing? Yet somehow you can keep a Social Security card your whole life. You can manage to hold that card your whole life.

Starting point is 00:31:00 That's a good point. But 12 words on a piece of paper, oh, my God, I'm too scared. That's a good point. So I like that part of it. I like the fact that you can do other things with it, right? I can get a normal margin account in my brokerage account, and i can buy more of a not like a 10x long trade wipe me out you know sort of bitmex thing but like i can have like a um uh uh uh what's the word um what's the word oh shit i can't think of the word

Starting point is 00:31:32 i thought i was the only one because english is not my mother tongue i thought i was the only one getting stuck like that orderly you can have an orderly margin account and you can be like yo i'm gonna buy this 2x long micro strategy right now i'm gonna full-on degen but then if you have a margin call you get like a nice email that says hey you've got like five days to figure your shit out or we're gonna sell some of this not like oh my god i borrowed on whatever this and it's like wiped out you know i like a lot of those things i think it's good um but this is still cover for that they will fight you etfs is 100 they will fight you face right it's like a decoy agent of they will fight you this is not the it's good and bad you know it's been a crazy year i mean look

Starting point is 00:32:20 we had all-time high it was a halving year etfs banner year for bitcoin like it's killer it's a great year and still at this point in time you know every tick down oh my god it's down it's below 60 000 again what's going on the 58k game they're gonna lose it and where are we going where do you think it's going it's going to zero i wish i gotta pay that for 21 million forever laura um the etfs are interesting like that i see bitcoin as two two things that are occurring at the same time so there's bitcoin as the investment and there's bitcoin as the revolution um i'm hardcore believer in the separation of money and state and i think that a lot of the censorship that we see and a lot of the like overreach from government uh stems from a root

Starting point is 00:33:16 issue a root cause and i think voting is important but it's a half measure really um and the the root cause is the state has the ability to just create money for free like like which is insane so it's like let me just fund this war for the end of time and i'm just going to continue to print money steal energy work and time from the populace to fund this war yep it's insane like it's it's like a bloodbath of of a terrible idea to give that much power to politicians so i really believe in the idea and maybe it's super idealistic of me and maybe i'm naive but you know i have my daughter i'm looking at her right now and it's like what world do i imagine her living in in the future and i really believe that if we manage

Starting point is 00:34:04 to pull this off and i think we'll be able to the world will be a much better place for it it'll be much more peaceful it'll be there'll be much more prosperity much more hope uh much more optimism like it just it fixes things and i think fiat breaks things and i think it not only breaks things on a financial level but i think it breaks people on a spiritual level right and i really believe it drives them crazy i agree so there's the revolution aspect the etfs are terrible for that i like what it's like uh it's like just give let's put it all in coinbase uh you know that We'll brand it differently, but MicroStrategy's Bitcoin is in Coinbase, and BlackRock is in Coinbase, and 8 out of the 9 ETFs, they're all in Coinbase. Perfect, convenient honeypot for the U.S. government to 6102 order it.

Starting point is 00:35:00 And then there's the investment aspect. The investment aspect, it's extremely positive because all of a sudden your mom, your aunt, your grandfather, whatever, it's like oh i could just go on my charles schwab account and i can buy bitcoin i was actually having a discussion with my father-in-law and he found like this etf related product where it doubles the volatility so like it doubled the volatility on the way up and it doubled the volatility on the way down and he just goes like he's like i'm gonna put in 25 percent of my stack into that so and i'm like what about self-custody he's like i don't know it's risky Oh, show off.

Starting point is 00:35:39 That's risky. So, yeah, I think there's two different components. Positive on the price side, potentially dangerous on the revolution aspect. Okay. What did you want to comment on? What is it? Well, I can't remember now. The thing with the ETFs is and the options, it allows them to play games with the price.

Starting point is 00:36:00 Right. Okay, this is another way to affect the price. Which will then affect the perception of the public. look at how much naked uh short sellers there are with gold and silver and that whole market and every other manipulated market but like my mom for example it was like i've been in bitcoin a while yeah i've never had her want nothing to do with it whatever got her a little bit of the etf got her the dca with two american exchanges yep now i'm gonna go home this christmas i'm gonna give her the secure element treasure you know we're gonna like go through it one by one and

Starting point is 00:36:33 then she's gonna but if i went to her day one and i was like yo it's a 6102 the government's gonna come after you they're gonna seize all your assets your 401k like it's all up for grabs we gotta get it out of here like it would be over she'd be like no i don't want anything to do with that right so it's like it's steps to get there right it's a yeah it's a gradual journey so there's a good and a bad in it okay i want your opinion about the recent um statement we've seen from the imf on el salvador it was pretty funny to see how they they're like scared of bitcoin they're like oh you guys at el salvador you're playing with your bitcoin too much we want you to like step back a bit and um you know don't be excited about it because here we are mommy and daddy came to

Starting point is 00:37:18 calm you down and bring you back to bring you back home when you're playing outside and uh becoming too wild so what do you what do you make of that statement that they made to me it shows like how desperate they are but you know i want to get you too yeah so it's hilarious because like the gdp of el salvador is 32 billion elon musk net worth is 265 billion okay he's a very small country like developing right in the grand scheme of things on an economic scale it's really not that big of a country why do they care so much the reason they care so much is because they're absolutely terrified of seeing other developing countries look at El Salvador and see Bitcoin as an alternative method than the IMF.

Starting point is 00:38:15 Right. And the IMF is essentially handing out these predatory loans to enslave these developing countries. Yes. And they see El Salvador adopting Bitcoin successfully. And they're like, wait a second. we might not be needed anymore that's where it comes from and the jargon that they pull out is so insidious because it's like we're worried about the financial stability of el salvador look when they first reacted to naim bukele passing that law they said they the whole and you

Starting point is 00:38:48 efrat you know this because you worked in traditional media right the whole media apparatus like white blood cells attacked this small country and nine bukele they said everything they can think of smeared in complete it was it was horrific and then they went to argentina and they said hey argentina we're going to give you a loan but one of the conditions of the loan is that you have to de-incentivize the adoption of alternative non-sovereign digital assets aka bitcoin fast forward a year later from that el salvador's gdp is reaching all-time highs the murder rate falls down to record lows making it one of the safest countries safer than most than some american cities and argentina goes through double digit inflation right so the

Starting point is 00:39:41 country that followed the imf's advice i think they've billed out argentina like five times once again finds itself in a horrific situation and the country that didn't follow the imf's advice is succeeding and flourishing and it's becoming an example for the rest of the region yeah so it's kind of like like like okay you guys could like hide behind the fancy emblems and the fancy words and all this sophisticated language but it's not that complicated if you adopt bitcoin whether you're an individual a country or a company your life your country your company is gonna get better because it's on a sound money standard if you don't adopt a sound money standard you're just gonna get poorer and the same mistakes are gonna continue to repeat themselves i believe the imf

Starting point is 00:40:34 was acting in a malicious manner i believe they are insincere in their statements but when i heard that lady's voice and the pitch in her voice what i'm hearing is fear they're scared of it they're scared of it they can't make it go away because it's decentralized yes so therefore they try to slander it but it's not working anymore yeah and they may try to coerce as well unless you want to add something to that not really nico said it best but just real quick you know So a strong leader in El Salvador. I don't think that the murder rate dropping is related to Bitcoin per se, but just having a leader who actually is taking care of the people and doing what's best for the people.

Starting point is 00:41:19 And I've been to El Salvador three times these last three years. And they're losing their grip on El Salvador. But after talking to Abubakar and 50-some African countries, they don't have that power that El Salvador has. El Salvador can almost give the middle finger and say, you know what, we're going to do what we're going to do. The African countries cannot do that. They're still completely reliant on the IMF, and they're unable to really do that yet. So it's where they still have their thumb on the level of control versus El Salvador. El Salvador is a great example.

Starting point is 00:41:53 I mean, you said it best. It's such a small amount. Why do they care? Why do they care? Because it's an example. I totally agree with you guys. And my friend Alex Craner, who's a geopolitical analyst, added when I shared that El Salvador better watch out. Both the 2014 war in Yemen and the 2019 coup in Bolivia followed after these nations had rejected IMF's offers.

Starting point is 00:42:20 So he's just alluding to the mafia tactics of these organizations. And I then tagged Naeem Bukele on that comment. I don't know if he's saying that, but I'm sure he's aware of what he's doing. And this guy has some goals. Yeah, I mean, to say the least, you know, it's like the old age adage of Bitcoiners. We love to say it, right? Bad times create strong men, strong men create good times. I think Naeem Bukele is like totally conscious and aware of the situation.

Starting point is 00:42:48 I mean, the speech that he gave at one of the RNC conventions in D.C. where he's looking at the camera and looking and said like look your taxes don't pay for your government's expenses it's the fact that they're printing money that takes some big cojones right like he is completely saying the choir part out loud you know um and then he did a recent interview with tucker where he was basically calling people demons and stuff yeah right like you know um yeah he probably has some good security i hope for him huge fan by the way me too huge fan no no me too i'm going there for the first time i can't wait okay like 2028 okay mike bitcoin startup funding what's needed in that space what's missing in that space

Starting point is 00:43:38 well it's gonna be great when we're in a full-on great environment right we just went through terrible times right we went through every you know the emperor's naked the tide is out you know block fi silicon valley bank celsius every possible scam and sham and thing that you could imagine all blew up right the maxis were right it was all terrible it was all going to happen you know everything was great and literally that's exactly what happened like it went exactly as it did from mount gox i still have a valid mount gox claim you know nobody was saying not your keys not your coins in 2013 that wasn't yet a thing right you just trusted them and you know you learn from those mistakes okay or you don't learn from those mistakes and you make those exact

Starting point is 00:44:28 same mistakes again you know nobody lost funds like that on unchained or companies that are trying to do lending in like a good way so what's needed now um is really honestly you know getting paid five percent not to invest over this past while that's a pretty good deal you know and um the ipo market has just been dry it's there hasn't been money distributed back to people and with a few things that we have coming up okay especially in bitcoin land which is novel as it is um there's going to be money finally getting back to investors and then those investors can decide to put it back into other deals so it's still like a super challenging funding environment with the exception of maybe one or two rounds uh between two to three million dollars max those are

Starting point is 00:45:20 not big numbers i mean in the frothy part of 2021 there was 50 million dollars 15 million dollars series that that stuff is not happening maybe it's happening in dlc ordinal land i don't really know okay because i'm not really following it maybe that's where all the money's flowing but in like normal land there aren't too many of those rounds and they're they're coming back soon i mean we're almost there i mean you're 10 away from an all-time high give or take you know so like it'll be here before you know it you know how it is and all of a sudden it just changes in a blink right a couple of down days people are not feeling good and then all of a sudden well i don't it's gonna be my first bull run oh yeah dude i'm i'm in the space for two and a half years oh okay but yeah

Starting point is 00:46:06 but you so the you have to experience the bear you're forged by the bear you earn your stripes in the bear and then the bull is you get like nine to twelve months of euphoria and then it's back to depression three years of just like slow stacking you know and then the cycle repeats if it's going to repeat yeah um but just to kind of add to muz's point so like i have a little bit of it and i'm absolutely sure muzz does as well i have a little bit of insight into different aspects of the industry so like obviously i'm a media play um but i i get numbers in terms of exchange volume and then how the miners are doing yep i'm telling you it is so the entire industry is like connected by the hip to the price of bitcoin and it seems like the vc world the vc bitcoin world is as well

Starting point is 00:47:01 and it's like your numbers like whether it's views it's depending on the price of bitcoin mining depending on the price of bitcoin exchange volume depending on the price of bitcoin everything is related to the price of bitcoin wow and if the price of bitcoin pumps you the entire industry just like flourishes so like i think our industry is like made for masochists because it's like you're dealing with like three years of like pain like really one year of like masochists are people who are very committed and strong yeah but it's it's it's psychotic in a way that maybe like one year of like where you think you're gonna go out of business two years of like melancholy yeah and then one year of euphoria right is that i mean pretty pretty much i mean you're gonna be having

Starting point is 00:47:52 a lot more sponsors and a lot more you know everything's better in the bull market right whether it's investor demand or everything it just it it feels better all the way around all right nico what's missing in the media bitcoin media space what's needed one of the things that you know i actually talked about this today like there there's something called the bitcoin echo chamber right so i think your podcast is a great like it's awesome because you've built up an audience that much more diverse yeah you it's not they they aren't following you because of bitcoin yeah that's true they get annoyed with me because of bitcoin some of them but you expose them you expose a normie audience to bitcoin and then you see like wow i can bitcoin is a tool to fix a lot

Starting point is 00:48:41 of these issues that the world is currently going through. As someone who started in Bitcoin media and has grown his audience from that, I have the exact opposite problem where it's my job is to break the echo chain. And I don't see myself as being at the top of the funnel, to be honest with you. But when I when I hear people like Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump making an appearance at the Bitcoin conference, RFK making an appearance at the Bitcoin conference, Russell Brand making an appearance at a Bitcoin conference. That is breaking the echo chamber because all of a sudden they're exposing their audience to an alternative non-sovereign form of money. And even if like one or two percent of their audience actually listens, compound that over a decade and you'll

Starting point is 00:49:36 see where we're going to end up. And that's where my audience grows, because Russell Brand now just minted a bunch of new Bitcoiners. They're going to want to consume Bitcoin content. And I'm going to be like, all right, yeah, I'm ready for you. So all I could do is just continuing to try to push against the walls. But the pie is only so big. It continues to grow year over year, which is and it's very dependent on the price. Also, you get these huge influxes like it is insane where you see all like all the big channels and like all the big influencers like i have the data set it's nuts you literally see them going from non-existent like they don't exist no one knows who they are to 2021 you just see their subscriber viewer count going up they establish a

Starting point is 00:50:27 base they lose maybe like 20 to 30 percent of their audience 70 percent of their audience sticks around beautiful so and then the cycle repeats yeah so then you get a new influx of people every time yeah yeah and then you kind of go from there so i would just say it's not really because again we're not really top of funnel yep it's really people like yourself and people that are have built an audience outside of bitcoin funneling people into bitcoin which obviously once you start holding a significant amount of your net worth in bitcoin you start to ask questions and that's where we come in yes we're like uh we will confirm your biases type of thing you know so you're the bitcoin wikipedia for beginners i love it in video which is the best we're we're uh we're

Starting point is 00:51:19 like a a daily talk show so we'll make you feel good about holding essentially right and then we'll like um the partners that we've picked are just all bitcoin companies so it's just entire bitcoin programming from a to z and from what we've heard a lot of the feedback we've heard is just like like you guys have helped us get through the bear markets like you guys are just there every single day and it gives us that kind of like reinforcement in our belief and again maybe if you're class of 2013 you know i've heard some ogs like simply bitcoin but maybe you don't tune in every day but i promise you if you're in the first couple years of bitcoin like you're consuming bitcoin content oh yeah regularly tell me about it i work oftentimes editing my own podcast listening

Starting point is 00:52:08 to you guys in the background just chatting about what's happening today this week it helps me catch up yeah for sure in the first two years you consume a lot of that for sure muz what do you want to leave us with nothing i can add i'm just lucky to be here with you guys and uh i love you and your jacket it's got to be really cool though in 2024 discovering bitcoin and consuming that content i remember what that was like and they didn't have all this they didn't have the production value of uh of a simply bitcoin or a lot of these podcasts they didn't have the regularity of a daily show and the ease of watching it you know there was like four or five things online you could watch a few antinopolis uh lectures that are still timeless today you know you had tone

Starting point is 00:52:54 and world crypto network and you know adam meister you know kem bozak you had like four random five random kind of nut jobs you know little channels but you didn't have like professional real people that were taking it seriously and doing it every day so that's a great level up for the 2024 person that's like let me consume as much as i can and you guys are giving them all the food in the buffet that they need every day thank you do you want to um do you want to leave the audience with a message before we end up go to thunderfunder.com simply right now and sign up right and you can sign up um but uh no i mean i would just say like um it's a very unique moment in human history and you have a opportunity to be a part of something bigger than yourself and you have

Starting point is 00:53:47 the opportunity to be a part of a revolution and all that is required of you as an individual to be part of that revolution is to opt out of the system and take bitcoin into self-custody if enough of us do it we will effectuate change without going through the traditional system of having to vote or like literally a kinetic revolution which is not very nice so we can actually change the world and we can make the world a much better place but it is going to require agency and action and it's going to require a lot of individuals standing up and taking a personal responsibility over the sovereignty of their wealth and i would say that's the call to action is just take self-custody of your bitcoin and you i guarantee you your life

Starting point is 00:54:35 will improve over time love it hallelujah and uh where should people follow you guys yeah you can find and search simply bitcoin anywhere if you want to follow me personally go to bitball and go check out thunderfunder.com simply um and uh check out muz muz do not underestimate the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit the world is about to get better these powers that control censorship whether it's financial and social they're all going away okay pluto is moving into aquarius yay it's going to be very awesome it happens mid-november we're going forward oh wow but check out uh lightning ventures ltng.ventures and thunderfunder.com awesome you guys i love you guys i really really thank you for doing this with me like semi-spontaneously i love the chat

Starting point is 00:55:31 with you i hope to have you back again on the show and thank you so much for investing your time and energy in this community in this ecosystem building what you're passionate about thanks shalom shalom peace out awesome that was a lot of fun quick break to share more about noster i found out about a really cool noster initiative this week some good people decided to invest more time and energy in raising awareness to noster and educating people about it so they set up this traveling noster booth in conferences and a series of special noster days in three cities buenos aires sao paulo and san salvador it's a full-fledged community project and they are crowdfunding for it on gazer if you're a supporter

Starting point is 00:56:26 of free speech and freedom technologies your donation would go a long way the link to the crowdfunding page is in the show notes conference booth we are blooming here at the Nostra booth it's amazing we are meeting amazing people and I can really feel that is a place where you can meet people working on different projects people working on different products Why am I bullish on Nostra? Because I met the most amazing people there. I'm bullish on Nostra because of free speech, baby. Two words, freedom and fun.

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 47: Nico & Muzz - The Revolution Is Under Way

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